Snowbird United States

Legendary

Dick Bass, the man who paid for Snowbird, was the first person to climb the highest mountain on every continent. He finished with Everest in 1985, at age 55.

He'd started as a Texas oilman who liked to recite poetry. Then, in 1969, he met a ski lodge manager named Ted Johnson at a party in Colorado, and a week later he showed up in Utah to see what Johnson was talking about.

Johnson had spent about ten years running the Alta Lodge at the top of Little Cottonwood Canyon. In his free time he explored the slopes just below Alta, a place called Peruvian Gulch, and decided it would make a better resort than anything in America.

He started buying land in 1963, much of it old silver mining claims. The canyon had once held a mining town of 8,000 people, until fire and avalanches wiped it out in the 1870s and 1880s.

Johnson's big idea was a tram. No American ski resort had one, but he'd seen them in the Swiss Alps, and he wanted a cable car that could carry people from the base straight to the top of Hidden Peak.

Bass agreed to help him find investors, then became the biggest investor himself. They hired a Swiss company to build the tram for $3.5 million.

Snowbird opened in December 1971. The tram was the largest and longest built anywhere in the world at the time, spanning about 8,400 feet of cable and climbing 2,900 vertical feet in about ten minutes.

Johnson, worn out by the effort, sold his share to Bass in 1974. A run called Silver Fox is named for his shock of silver hair.

The resort gets about 500 inches of snow a year, and the granite cliffs of the canyon trap it. Some years the lifts run into May, and once in a while, on the Fourth of July.

Unlike Alta next door, Snowbird allows snowboarding. Since 2002, a joint ticket has let skiers cross between the two resorts over the top of the mountain through a bowl called Mineral Basin.

Ride the tram to Hidden Peak at 11,000 feet, where the cabins now have glass floors and the view stretches across the Wasatch Range. Take the Peruvian Tunnel, a moving carpet that carries you 600 feet straight through the ridge, the only ski tunnel in North America. In summer, ride the tram up for the sundeck, or try the mountain coaster and alpine slide at the base.